Everything but the book

She already has two best-sellers under her belt. She has 100 percent name recognition, prohibitive political support in the polls — and more money than most ordinary people could ever dream of. So why does Hillary Clinton need another book, much less one that’s pre-sold a million copies and dominated news coverage even before its official release?

The answer: Her forthcoming book tour and the attendant multiplatform media blitz are about everything but the book and the bucks. To begin with, the rollout of “Hard Choices,” which officially begins Tuesday, presents a perfect way to gather priceless retail consumer data that can later be put to political use.

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Inside POLITICO: Book touring pols

“She’ll have a very, very robust not just book website, but an entire digital strategy,” said Robert Gibbs, who eight years ago helped then-Sen. Barack Obama organize the book tour that morphed into his presidential campaign.

“They’ll use all these events she goes to acquire information that can later be purchased by some political entity – whether it’s her campaign, or a super-PAC, or both. These will be people who’ll be exhibiting a relatively fresh desire to see and hear more of Hillary. We always figured if someone was going to buy a book, we’d made about half the sale, in a political sense, if someone was going to stand on line and wait to get an autograph. Knowing who’s in that line, and where they live and how to cultivate them — my guess is they’ll do a lot of that.”

The blockbuster political book is nothing new. In 1948, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then being courted by both political parties, set the publishing world afire with “Crusade in Europe,” his memoir of World War II, for which he was paid the stunning advance of $635,000 (and allowed, by a special IRS ruling, to treat the income as a capital gain because he was not a professional writer, thus saving about $400,000 in taxes).

Nearly 20 years ago, Colin Powell released his memoir, “My American Journey,” with a first printing of 800,000 copies and a whirlwind trip that Time magazine called “the D-Day of author tours,” one that took him to 23 cities in 20 days, and included interviews with Barbara Walters, Larry King, Jay Leno and Tom Brokaw and a private preview with top editors and reporters at The New York Times. It was all a prelude to a prospective presidential campaign that struck fear in Bill Clinton’s White House, though Powell ultimately decided against running.

But Powell’s politics were a comparative mystery — he had recently retired as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff — while Hillary Clinton’s are already well known, and she herself is a grizzled veteran of the mega book tour with her first memoir, “Living History,” in 2003. Still, the release of her latest effort is being universally treated as big news (whether or not it really reveals anything more newsworthy than her confession that her Senate vote for the Iraq was wrong, “plain and simple”).

Personal appearances will drive book sales, which could eventually drive voter turnout, and Clinton has data resources available to her in the age of social media that Powell and his would-be backers could only dream of.

“They can really take advantage of all these new tools with her, because she has a huge social media following,” said Gretchen Crary, a veteran book publicist who now runs February Media, her own public relations and marketing firm. “Authors really should take a page from politicians’ playbooks, because you build an audience the same way you build a constituency: You have to go to these anemic coffee klatches where three people show up, and turn them into your ambassadors.”

Clinton’s house party days are well behind her, but Gibbs noted that as a sitting senator in 2006, Obama faced legal constraints on the gathering and use of sales data upon publication of “The Audacity of Hope,” limits that Clinton will not have to deal with. At the same time, he noted, the ability to collect and analyze such information has greatly improved, and the book — and attendant media interviews — will give Clinton a chance to articulate her potential platform for a 2016 race.